Cups are always the first thing you make out of clay, unless you need an ashtray even more. These are stoneware, of course, which make them very desirable as coffee mugs but I was always pretty lousy at making handles. I still make my handles by rolling out a snake of clay. I am stuck in the Ton Dynasty.

Now these were pretty nice stoneware cups made with glazes I developed. They even sold and were my only sale, ever, to some big time Sacramento collectors!

But the cups really broke open when we finally got whiteware. Half kaolin and half talc with sand thrown in, they fired at a much lower temperature and we could use commercially available hobbiest glazes.

And we didn't even have to always use glazes, we could use China paints and lusters over clear glazes to get a whole different look. These were my two cats, at the time.

This is my earliest version of this subject. It was a big leap to be able to overcome my Catholic up bringing and actually make Mary and Jesus frogs. This is also about the time I stopped going to mass.

In this second version, I had really refined my frog image and the details.

Sebastian is my favorite martyr, tied to a pillar and pierced by pussy willow shafts, he is not only the patron of archers but also protects you from the plague.

Other than trilobites, cephalopods are my favorite Devonian fossil. It is so much fun to coil up a horn of clay into a shell and even more fun to fill the opened end of that shell with wiggly tentacles.

His story is told on these three cups. First he climbs and slobbers all over The Guggenhiem, then does his business on The Capitol and finally meets his end on The Empire State Building.

I first made frogs as cup handles, dancing around the top of mushrooms with rhinos, but then I combined them with the elephant foot stools I had already made.

Napoleon was the first frog character I ever made and right after I made Madonna and Frog. Also he was the first bust I made though hardly the last.

My first series of frog pieces concerned a troop of FrogScouts touring their world. Here, we see a couple of them entering the Taj Mahal which you can see is a lot more colorful in the FrogWorld. White was really unknown in archetecture unless a building was snow covered or as in the case of The White House was covered with vanilla frosting.